Resiliency has always been a key word for business continuity, with many companies focusing on the ability of their systems to rapidly recover from their disruptions and to better adapt to those same disruptions in the future. In comparison, the importance of high availability for business continuity is often left as an afterthought, and only strongly considered once a lack of availability becomes a disruption.
Focusing on a system’s ability to remain operational without interruption, building in considerations for high availability can greatly improve redundancy with the associated uptime benefits, particularly during periods where disaster recovery is critical. This can take the form of implementing mirrored systems, so that in the event of a failure, the disrupted system can immediately have its tasks taken over by a fully active and up to date standby resource. While these high availability systems can add cost, the savings associated with this increased uptime can help offset those costs.
The above isn’t so say that high ability is enough by itself. Rather, companies should continue to consider resiliency in their business continuity and disaster recovery plans, primarily by regularly considering what previous events disrupted their operations and processes and adapting their methods and systems accordingly. By considering both resiliency and high availability, an organization can give themselves the best chance to make it through a disaster with the least damage.
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